Sources: 'Better than average chance' UConn will join ACC

Updated 12:50 am, Tuesday, September 20, 2011

The University of Connecticut has serious interest in joining the Atlantic Coast Conference, sources with knowledge of the university's position confirmed Monday.

Rebuilding the Big East in the wake of the departure of Syracuse and Pittsburgh to the ACC remains a priority, but right now self-preservation trumps any restoration project.

"I think they're both priorities, but the one we can really be the most proactive with is (the ACC)," one source said. "We've got to take care of ourselves. My gut's telling me there's a better-than-average chance we'll be in the ACC. (UConn president Susan Herbst) is in pretty constant communication. She knows a couple of the presidents and things like that. She's working on it."

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Sources said that UConn has not filed an application for membership with the ACC. The process is not that simple. Syracuse and Pittsburgh reportedly had been working on their respective moves for some time before it became official Sunday.

"You don't really apply," one source said. "You only apply if you know you're going to get in. This is not going to be a quick-fire thing. This is going to take a little time because the ACC is in the position of power. So they're going to look around and they're going to talk to Notre Dame and see if they've got any interest. They're going to shop around."

A source also confirmed to Hearst Connecticut Newspapers an Associated Press report that school and conference officials from the Big East and Big 12 have been discussing ways to merge what's left of the two leagues if Texas and Oklahoma leave the Big 12 for the Pac-12, taking Oklahoma State and Texas Tech with them.

The board of regents at both Texas and Oklahoma voted Monday to give their presidents the right to choose a new conference.

Longtime UConn men's basketball coach Jim Calhoun insists he doesn't know where the Huskies will land, but he's confident the school and his program will remain relevant despite the upheaval of conference realignment. Calhoun says even influential coaches aren't the decision-makers in this process.

"I think this is at the presidential level, clearly, as you can see from Pittsburgh and Syracuse," Calhoun said Monday, who added that he has spoken with his longtime friend and rival Jim Boeheim, Syracuse's basketball coach, about the recent changes.

"I have a great deal of faith in Susan (Herbst)," Calhoun said of UConn's new president. "I know that she's been able to get some other counsel to help us through this. But most importantly it's her decision."

Calhoun would not go into detail about the counsel Herbst is receiving, though multiple sources have confirmed former Big East commissioner Mike Tranghese is advising Herbst and UConn.

The conference Tranghese helped Dave Gavitt start appears to be on the brink of extinction, though it may simply take another form.

"We have to go someplace," Calhoun said, not ruling anything out. "I think we're very attractive to anybody. We certainly have no qualms with what we've done basketball-wise in the last 20 years. We've just put over $200 million into football and built a stadium that's expandable."

Tranghese, in an interview with Mike Francesa on WFAN-AM, had strong words about the conference shuffling.

"College athletics is controlled by football and controlled by money,'' Tranghese said. "It's chaotic. There's no one in charge. It's all the conferences. And I don't blame commissioners. I don't blame schools. We have presidents who are supposedly in charge. We've lost all sense of loyalty, all sense of integrity, all sense of fairness. It is absolute chaos. And the Big East has been vulnerable for a long time because we didn't play good enough in football.''

UConn spokesman Mike Enright said Monday that interim athletic director Paul Pendergast is not conducting any interviews. His first official day at UConn has been moved to Oct. 1; he was supposed to start Monday. Jeff Hathaway, the former athletic director who was pressured into retiring, worked his last day at UConn on Friday.

Joining the ACC seems to be the most beneficial move for UConn because it is an established conference and the member schools seemingly are there to stay. The Orlando Sentinel reported Monday that Villanova -- which plays in the Football Championship Subdivision (formerly Division I-AA) -- was among numerous Big East schools that have applied to join the ACC.

Meanwhile, the future of the Big East is mired in uncertainty. Should the Big 12 dissolve, schools such as Baylor, Iowa State, Kansas, Kansas State and Missouri could join the Big East. However, the source said that this would not necessarily stabilize the Big East.

"There's so many moving parts to this thing right now,'' a source said. "But the problem with this is even if there is this Big 12/Big East hybrid type of thing, a lot of people are going to consider it a temporary home. If you have this league with Connecticut and Missouri and Kansas and Iowa State, you're talking about a situation where even when the league is founded it's going to be a tenuous situation where almost everybody's planning for it to fail. It's a hideaway for 10 years or something like that.''